Boy, Monday evening was a horrid day for me. I’m sharing because it can happen to anyone – if you’re on the Internet.
Here’s my saga. I just got involved with Twitter and I was doing a Google search for “Twitter Backgrounds.” On the 2nd page of searches, I came across an interesting search result so I clicked to go to the page. The page showed some backgrounds I liked and I clicked to see more backgrounds. Nothing happened. Suddenly, I see a download status bar at the bottom of the page and immediately knew something was wrong. I tried to exit the page but I couldn’t. Couldn’t stop the download. I was helpless. The link I clicked was supposed to be a link to go to another page, but that was a disguise.
I began to close all my open windows. About 5 minutes later, a window popped up that said, “Your computer has been infected.” It was instructing me to click to install a program called “Spyware Protect 2009.” Remember this name or take note of it somewhere. Warning windows began popping up every 15 seconds and would not stop. 3 different warning windows. Internet Explorer (IE) was dead. It would not let me access IE. Kept getting error messages.
I did not click to install the product. So far, all I have is a download. But even the download had done damage.
I would have been totally helpless if I did not have another pc. I did a search on my laptop for “Spyware Protect 2009.” Got search results of over 17,000,000. And it is was real obvious from glancing at the results that it was bad.
To cut this short, it took me 5 hours, a whole bunch of program downloads to laptop, installs to desktop via dvd drive, file deletion, rebooting, renaming files and “pleas to God” to finally get rid of the malicious software. It was a mentally draining process.
I can’t recall the name of the site where I got the bug or I would share with everyone. It’s no doubt at other sites too.
We always hear to be cautious visiting unknown sites. Easily said, but aren’t just about all sites we visit “unknown” sites? That’s the beauty of the Internet. Information megaville. Many sites are familiar but most are not. We even do downloads from unfamiliar sites. Hard not to. But when a download has been disguised as a basic click-through, this is trouble in a major way.
Proceed with caution everyone.
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